Little House in the Big City

One of my grandest delusions of miniature is to have a tiny house on a vacant lot in a city. This is really quite the delusion.

Cover of the "Vacant Land Issue" of the City Paper

In my dream world, it would be a tiny house on a lot covered with growing things. I would have so much extra space I could make a community garden and be the official community garden guard! My tiny house could be my little, creepy-surveillance station! Wouldn’t that be cute?

And with all the space I would have on the lot, since my house would hardly take any room at all, I could grow trees and still have lots of space for sunlight,veggies and food. I would grow cool trees like fig trees and the Eastern Redbud, which has pink flowers in spring that taste like sugar-snap peas!

Check out the Eastern Redbud, Image Courtesy Wikipedia.

Wouldn’t these little pink flowers look beautiful on a salad? They taste like sugar-snap peas!

(Side note: The botanical name of Eastern Redbud is Cercis canadensis, “Cercis” meaning heart-shaped because it has heart-shaped leaves. Heart-shaped leaves!)

As you might guess, there are a few issues with this delusion. Some of them are covered in “The Vacant Land Issue” from the City Paper, July 21, 2011. One big one? It is freakin’ difficult for regular people (or even fake, high-ranking and landlubbin’ Captains) to purchase vacant lots. Then it is even harder for regular people to develop them.

Also according to my research, it is pretty freakin’ expensive to acquire a lot. Especially if the lot is really vacant and not just an abandoned property (with a building requiring demolition which is expensive). Many lots I looked up were $300,000–you could buy a really nice house with money like that! And a REALLY nice tiny house. The value of a lot is related to zoning, which is complicated for regular people to understand and brings me to my next point.

I haven’t really looked into it, but I think zoning-wise it might be pretty difficult to put a tiny house on a lot. Especially if you wanted to hook up plumbing or electrical. However, if you went off-the-grid it might be possible to skirt these issues. I don’t know anything about how RVs are written up in city codes. This is definitely something to investigate.